Commission given update on recent rain

Published: Tuesday, August 20, 2013 at 07:50 PM.

“People forget you can’t control the accuracy of the weather reports; you certainly can’t control the amount of rainfall we have,” Tunnell said.

The commissioner said he spoke Monday with a lady who was talking about suing the county, and he told her she would have to take her complaints to a “much higher authority.”

Thomas also received calls, though his district covers the beach. He stressed the lake is the county’s only source of drinking water, noting the gates could be left wide open all the time, but that might cause problems.

“If … the people of Bay County can’t turn that tap on, we’re in a lot worse trouble than we are with your yard getting wet,” Thomas said.

Some of the members chalked the heavy rain up to an act of God.

“We prayed for rain here for 10 years; now we need to pray a little bit for dry weather,” said Chairman George Gainer.

PANAMA CITY — County commissioners and staff Tuesday tried to dispel the notion they didn’t act quickly enough to lower the level of Deer Point Lake to prevent flooding for nearby homes and property.

When major storms come, the county opens drawdown gates to drain the lake, preventing it from backing up into the surrounding lands.

Bay County Utility Services Director Paul Lackemacher said the gates were open Aug. 13, which dropped the lake level to 4.5 feet, the same depth the lake was at before a monstrous storm in early July.

County officials fully opened the gates despite an Aug. 12 weather report that predicted a 20 percent chance of rain because it looked like the area was “going to get slammed,” Lackemacher said. The county already had been taking precautions against a major storm, keeping the lake at 4.8 feet, rather than its usual 5 feet, he said.

“This is our only way of controlling the level. There is no flood control. … We just got more rain than we could possibly handle at a given time,” Lackemacher said.

Some residences around the lake have been flooded because of the unprecedented rainfall this summer, with the latest storm setting “historical highs” for the lake and nearby creeks, Lackemacher said. The county has recorded more than 36 inches of rain since July 3.

During the latest storm, from Aug. 13-18, the county recorded 12.56 inches of rain; from July 3-6, the county recorded 15 inches of rain, Lackemacher said.

“We’ve never seen this before,” he said.

The soggy summer has saturated the ground in the region’s 435-square-mile watershed, so rainfall isn’t being absorbed, just flowing directly into the lake and the creeks, Lackemacher said.

Commissioners echoed Lackemacher’s sentiments, saying the county acted in a timely fashion and did all it could, though there’s little that can be done with this amount of rain.

“Hopefully those folks out there that have been burning up our phone lines will tune in to this,” said Commissioner Guy Tunnell, whose rural district saw the most severe flooding. “They may not all believe it, but I do.”

Tunnell said he heard from two or three people saying the gates weren’t down.

“I knew there was a lot more to the story than the kind of calls I was getting,” he said.

Coming down

Lackemacher said the current lake level is 7.5 feet above sea level and slowly coming down, but it will take some time to drain the extra water.

“Now this is going to be shedding into the lake for some time,” he said.

The county has had the gates open “at some level or another” since June 28, Lackemacher said.

“We received many calls over the weekend and yesterday (Monday); obviously people are very concerned and have problems with flooding and so forth,” he said.

Commissioner Mike Thomas pointed out that many residents weren’t happy.

“Concerned,” he said jokingly, “I thought you said ‘mad.’ ”

The water plant also is taking in the worst quality water Lackemacher has ever seen. He brought two glass jars to the meeting, one with the dark intake water, the other with the clean output water.

“This is probably as bad as we’ve ever seen at the plant as far as its chemical makeup (and) organic matter that’s coming in,” he said.

The county is “pushing the limits” of the treatment process because its plant was never designed to handle this type of water, Lackemacher said.

“We’ve been able to maintain water quality to a better degree than we thought possible,” he said.

Praising county employees

Commissioners also spent time praising county employees for the job they did in response to the storm.

“People forget you can’t control the accuracy of the weather reports; you certainly can’t control the amount of rainfall we have,” Tunnell said.

The commissioner said he spoke Monday with a lady who was talking about suing the county, and he told her she would have to take her complaints to a “much higher authority.”

Thomas also received calls, though his district covers the beach. He stressed the lake is the county’s only source of drinking water, noting the gates could be left wide open all the time, but that might cause problems.

“If … the people of Bay County can’t turn that tap on, we’re in a lot worse trouble than we are with your yard getting wet,” Thomas said.

Some of the members chalked the heavy rain up to an act of God.

“We prayed for rain here for 10 years; now we need to pray a little bit for dry weather,” said Chairman George Gainer.

In other business:

l The commission approved taking out a $3 million line of credit to serve as start-up money as it takes over emergency ambulance service for the area. The money will fill the gap initially while the county waits for payments for ambulance rides to come through.

l The commission approved a memorandum of understanding with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission for the construction, operation and maintenance of a new gun range at the Steelfield Road Landfill.

NOTE: Clicking on hashtags in this stream may result in seeing adult material, such as photos or foul language, that appear elsewhere on Twitter. We do not endorse such material, but we do not have control over what items can be found in hashtag searches.